This paper presents a model for a 14-week virtual peer mentoring (VPM) program created during the COVID-19 pandemic to develop a community and a sense of belonging among freshmen and rising sophomores in computing. The impact of the pandemic on the students at Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC), an open-access, majority minority-serving institution in the southeast was especially devastating. The sudden shift from fully face-to-face to fully online instruction created a sense of isolation and significantly impacted student enrollment, withdrawal, and failure rates. In VPM, upper-level Information Technology (IT) students served as peer mentors, providing guidance and support to first-generation and Pell-grant recipient mentees, mostly incoming freshmen, and rising sophomores. Mentoring was structured and each peer mentor worked with a small group of mentees. Weekly mentor-mentee sessions covered topics such as growth mindset, problem-solving, self-efficacy, learning strategies, campus resources, and IT careers among others. Pre- and post-survey results from the pilot study conducted in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 revealed improvements in students' sense of belonging. Analysis of enrollment data further demonstrated the program's effectiveness, with higher retention and progression rates among program completers. These findings highlight the success of the VPM program in enhancing students' sense of belonging in the IT department despite the insurmountable challenges posed by the pandemic. These findings motivate the authors to continue the program and conduct a longer study to investigate the impact of the program on other factors, such as self-efficacy, motivation, engagement, and graduation.

To meet the ever-increasing demand for information technology (IT) workforce, we must educate and produce high-quality graduates. It is crucial to balance fundamental programming concepts and coding skills to develop skilled IT work forces who solve a complicated real-life problem using technology. In this project, we created scenario-based active learning modules by using a visual platform to improve student learning on programming concepts and skills.